Semi Secret Software Goes Open Source with Canabalt for iOS

One of my all-time favorite games for iOS, Canabalt, has gone open source on us. For real.

The developers at Semi Secret Software have released all of the source code, music, graphics and a bunch of other goodies for everyone from serious app developers and casual hacks around the world to tinker with. How cool is that? (If you want to jump right into the open source goodness, go here)

Triggering the release of this goodness was the Indie iPhone Holiday Sale, which Semi Secret took part in. To date the sale has raised over $25,000 for Child’s Play, an organization that brings games and toys to children in hospitals around the world. Very admirable indeed. In the spirit of charity and holiday gift giving, Semi Sonic have pushed the games internal workings to open source for everyone from seasoned devs to hobby-time programmers to play around with. If you’ve ever wanted to hash together your own version of Canabalt (and heck, even publish it in the App Store) now’s your chance.

For what it’s worth, Canabalt was created in Flash, start-to-finish in 5 days. From there, the app was ported to iOS in 10 days… paving the way for more than 225,000 copies to sell via the App Store. Impressive indeed. The ‘auto runner’ genre was the result… along with hours of my own personal time wasted, while I concentrated, head down, trying to jump from building to building trying to avoid falling to my untimely death (if you’ve played the game you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about).

Important Note for Devs: Semi Secret does note that all Canabalt-specific game art, code, animation and music are all proprietary… So, feel free to work with their engine code, but don’t even think about re-using any of the graphics, music, etc. Engine stuff = good. Canabalt-specific stuff = bad.